on. All his past seemed but part of a
desert, lonely and barren and strange.

In the previous year he had made a journey to Arizona with Jowett, to
see some railway construction there, and at a ranch he had visited
he came upon some verses which had haunted his mind ever since. They
fastened upon his senses now. They were like a lonesome monotone which
at length gave calm to his torturing reflections. In his darkness the
verses kept repeating themselves:

"I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still
There was Winter in my world and in my heart:
A breath came from the mesa and a message stirred my will,
And my soul and I arose up to depart.

I heard the desert calling; and I knew that over there,
In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
Was a woman of the sunrise, with the starshine in her hair,
And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.

In the night-time when the ghost-trees glimmered in the moon,
Where the mesa by the watercourse was spanned,
Her loveliness enwrapped me like the blessedness of June,
And all my life was thrilling in her hand.

I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still;
There is Summer in my world and in my heart;
A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."

This strange, half-mystic song of the mesa and the olive-groves, of the
ghost-trees and the moon, kept playing upon his own heated senses like
the spray from a cooling stream, and at last it quieted him. The dark
spirit of self-destruction loosened its hold.

His brain had been strained beyond the normal, almost unconsciously his
fingers had fastened on the pistol in the drawer of the table by his
bed. It had been there since the day when he had travelled down from
Alaska--loaded as it had been when he had carried it down the southern
trail. But as his fingers tightened on the little engine of death,
from the words which had been ringing in his brain came the flash of a
revelation:

"... And a will beyond my will
Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."

A will beyond his will! It was as though Fleda's fingers were laid upon
his own; as though she whispered in his ear and her breath swept his
cheek; as though she was there in the room beside him, making the
darkness light, tempering the wind of chastisement to his naked soul.
In the overstrain of his